Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (2008)

“A lively and entertaining—if occasionally horrifying—read… Like a master archaeologist who can see through the shards and stones of a dig to reconstruct the culture of the city below, Kaplan lays out all the failures, omissions, and delusions of Bush administration officials. The result is an account of the pathologies…of Washington itself…a caution about the limits of purely military power and the dangers of seeing the world as a morality play.”
Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Washington Post Book World

“Illuminating…incisive…”
Michiko Kakutami, The New York Times

“Excellent and devastating… Go, please, and buy Kaplan’s book. His great work deserves attention and reward.”
Joe Klein, Time

“The inside history of our time, told with precision and confidence, by an author who knows where the secrets are kept.”
Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco

“Fred Kaplan has long been one of our most incisive thinkers about strategic issues. In this provocative book, he challenges many of our assumptions about the post-9/11 world and offers a dose of realism about the way the world actually works after the end of the Cold War. It’s a bracing read.”
Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein and The Wise Men

“In his Slate chronicles through the Iraq War years, Fred Kaplan consistently outshone other analysts with his explanations of what was going wrong, and why. In this engrossing and completely new work, he tells the story of the little-known theorists who have shaped much of the world’s recent history. For me this book was full of revelations.”
James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly

Full Book Reviews

Washington Post Book World (Anne-Marie Slaughter)
New York Times (Michiko Kakutani)
Boston Globe (H.D.S. Greenway)
Time (Joe Klein)
Washington Monthly (Kevin Drum)
Chicago Sun Times (Andrew Greeley)